AMD launches Polaris-powered Radeon Pro 500 series

AMD has announced a new family of workstation-targeted graphics processors, the Polaris-based Radeon Pro 500 series, even as its customer Apple promises to begin shipping machines with next-generation Vega replacements by December.

Announced during Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) last night, AMD's Radeon Pro 500 series can be found in the company's updated iMac all-in-one systems and MacBook Pro laptops - but not, interestingly, the iMac Pro Apple will launch in December with significantly more powerful Vega-based graphics. The top-end model, the Radeon Pro 580, promises 5.5 trillion floating-point operations per second (T/FLOPS) of compute performance in a thermal envelope AMD claims is perfectly suited to the iMac's slim all-in-one design.

'It is incredibly satisfying to see the capabilities of Radeon Pro 500 series in elegant form factors and enabling amazing content creation, gaming and VR experiences,' crowed Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect of the Radeon Technologies Group at AMD. 'Radeon Pro 500 Series graphics are enabling new generations of makers with compute-accelerated creative tools and new APIs, bringing their imaginations to life in ways like never before.'

The Radeon Pro 500 series starts with the Radeon Pro 555, which has 12 compute units for a total of 768 stream processors, 81GB/s of memory bandwidth, and offers a 1.3 T/FLOPS peak performance. The Radeon Pro 560 ups this to 16 compute units for 1,024 stream processors and up to 1.9 T/FLOPS of compute. The Radeon Pro 570, meanwhile, offers 28 compute units with 1,792 total stream processors and significantly boosted 217GB/s memory bandwidth for a promised 3.6 T/FLOPS, while the Radeon Pro 575 ups the stakes to 32 compute units for 2,048 stream processors and 4.5 T/FLOPS peak performance. Finally, the aforementioned Radeon Pro 580 packs 36 compute units for 2,304 stream processors and a peak performance of 5.5 T/FLOPS.

More information on the new Radeon Pro 500 series is available from the official website.